Abstract
—Network coverage is an increasing concern for the Quality of Service (QoS) targets of new mobile technologies. New solutions designed to fulfill the requirements of the existing fifth-generation (5G) and upcoming sixth-generation (6G) emerging scenarios are based on deploying a high number of network access points (APs), which tend to considerably degrade coverage and cell-edge performance due to added interference and increase the energy consumption of cellular systems. In this paper, we present new results on our recently proposed novel concept of cell-sweeping that aims to minimize the coverage dead-spots and improve cell-edge user performance. More specifically, the concept is explored further in this paper analyzing the impact of different cell-sweeping configurations and evaluating the potential benefits towards achieving energy efficiency. By means of system level computer simulations, it is shown that cell-sweeping provides energy savings of 11% and 26.5% for a similar average and cell-edge user throughput performance, respectively, when compared to the conventional static cell deployment in a typical urban macro cell scenario.